💭 Why even have a backlog if you're not going to play the games on it?
We went away for a long weekend in Marseille. Which was really nice. But I came home from our trip really looking forward to playing a game. Like, really looking forward to it. You know when you're away, and you're like, "yeah, when I get back I'm going to sit on the sofa, cold drink (it's still hot but not as hot as the week before, thank goodness), Switch 2, World Cup on in the background (unless it's Brazil, LET'S GO BRAZIL!!).
My son finally goes down for sleep, I sit down...I pick up my Switch...and I don't know what to play. Which is so annoying because I have games. I have a lot of games. I have a backlog. I even created The Long Play, a curated list of games from my actual backlog that I really think would be worth playing through. And I'm looking at it thinking... I don't know what to play; I've got nothing. 🤦🏻♀️
I don't know what I'm in the mood for. That's the thing. It's not even "what should I play?" It's like...what do I feel like? And I don't know how to answer that sometimes. Do I play a bit of everything until something clicks? Like try five games every evening until one of them grabs me? I don't really ever do that though. I have to pick something that will stick with me from the first moment (yeah, I've got high standards for myself...tell me about it). So I do that, but then I inevitably hit a lull, and I'm like "okay, I'll come back to this later," and I move on to something else anyway...
Last week I played a few demos, Yooka Replaylee and Adventures of Elliot, that really stuck in my head. I'm still thinking about them a week later, though the reviews for Elliot aren't praising it. Anyway, I decided to play Banjo Kazooie (a game, mind you, that is NOT on my Long Play List 🤦🏻♀️), because Yooka Replaylee is the spiritual successor of Banjo-Kazooie. So I thought, okay, it'll scratch the itch. Plus my brother LOVED this game. I remember him playing it when we were younger. And I was definitely transported back in time when I heard the sound effects. Omg, the "voices" of all the characters. Blast from the past indeed. I never got into this game because I was terrible at navigating 3D spaces as a kid. I still struggle to this day, but I'd like to think I struggle less...or that games have gotten better at manipulating the camera 😅
Banjo Kazooie is fun. It does scratch the platformer collectathon itch I was craving after playing the Yooka Replaylee demo. But it's an N64 game. You feel it. You see it. The movement, the camera...My friend Lu (over at Luna's Gaming Log) shared this post by Dillon from Your Friend Who Likes Games, and I feel very similarly to Dillon when it comes to revisiting some of these games on Nintendo Switch Online. Especially N64. It really does feel like playing version 1.0 of something you already know the final version of.
So then I think maybe I should go back to Dragon Quest V because I'm like 80% through. I'm pretty sure I'm near the end. I just need to finish it. And I liked it. I LOVE Dragon Quest. So why didn't I finish it? I don't know.
I kinda envy people who can go deep on one thing. Like the people who know everything about a series. Every entry. Every detail. They can just commit to one thing. I've never really been like that. Not even professionally. I've always done lots of different things. Different roles, different skills. To use an improv metaphor (also a past career of mine)...I dug wide rather than deep. I went horizontally rather than vertically. I've always treated that as a bad thing. Like to me, specialists feel more...real somehow? More serious? More "this is someone who knows that they're doing so you can definitely trust them." And I don't really feel like that about myself, because I've gone so wide.
And it looks like I've done the same in games. I jump. I switch. I get interested, and then I move on. Not because I hate things. Just because...I move on. I don't know if that's good, bad, or...It's just what I do. But I do crave depth sometimes. I really want to be the kind of person who really knows something. But maybe I'm just not that person. I don't know.
All I know is that I was really excited to play a video game last night, really looking forward to it, but then wasted the evening not being able to pick anything.
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